It’s not that you’re chasing a white moth through the forest; it’s just that she happens to be flying ahead of you, right? It’s just that things come to you when you’re walking. And you to them.
An ephemeral forest pool, fed by spring rains. Here at the top of the watershed the rain doesn’t quite know where to go, so it sits for a while. Ripples on the surface show how any point can be the center of an expanding universe. I love watching them intersect and cancel each other out.
song dogs
on the trail of some
ripe panic
At some point in my late teens, I took over from my dad as chief executioner. I think it bothered me slightly less than it bothered him, a life-long pacifist.
a V of swans
my fingers still sticky
with chicken blood
The dark, seasonal pool at the top of the watershed has dried up, so where do I go now to let my eyes relax and envision possibilities apart from the doom-scroll on my phone or laptop?
cracks in the mud
100% chance
of chaos
the urge to go on a voyage
body moving with purpose
the devil is in on it
the best way to keep me from myself
whatever comes of history
we could wake without hurting it
hunt for a nipple
in the clear rain
On the last day of April, Facebook gives us a new way to react: a care emoji. Yellow generic-person hugs a disembodied heart, perhaps the heart that absence makes fonder. But to older eyes, unless you squint, it looks like someone clutching an open wound.
taking shelter
under my umbrella
mosquito
quarantine walk
stopping at the sound
of a jet
I can’t stop marveling at how quiet it’s become under lockdown. In normal times I find the close horizons of this narrow hollow in the hills a bit claustrophobic, but now that there’s so much less noise echoing around in it from adjacent highways, the nearby quarry, and factories and businesses in town, it feels more spacious. A pair of local Canada geese fly over at dusk and I hold my breath, listening to their wingbeats. I no longer envy animals that live underground their superior soundproofing.
last week’s rain
that hush
in the moss
tall hemlock
nearly dead from adelgids
unfeathered
every year more rain
railroad noise burrows
into the ferns
that ice avalanche
my brother’s mark on a tree
lost to moss
two faces
on the side of a beech
one has no mouth
fallen cucumbertree
the white undersides
of its leaves
roots lost their grip
on the saturated slope
seed pods still clenched
leaf duff undotted
by any black cherries
rained out
that mob of red trilliums
melted away
foam in the stream
one katydid
this late in the season
texting my wife
migrant flycatcher
swiping its beak back and forth
on a bare branch
a plastic toy football
unearthed by the summer floods
all the stream’s voices
rain-softened ground
even the gravel road
has a bit of give
paper birch trees can only bend
so far before they break
under the weight of freezing rain
rhododendron leaves
tough as old scrolls are stripped
by starving deer
but some always resprout from the roots
having who knows how many
lifetimes of practice
The earth has water older than
the sun, scientists say. I’ll never
see rain the same way again,
or hear it tap on the roof
at 4:00 a.m. and not wonder
what other skies it has fallen from,
what other oceans it once also
returned to as if going home.
Scientists say they’re more certain
than ever that planets
throughout the cosmos harbor this
resident alien. And remembering
how many times the eye
has evolved on Earth alone,
I listen to the drumming
on the roof and imagine
Goldfinches gad about
in the blossoming crowns of the oaks,
brassy as advertising.
The clouds draw in.
Wood thrushes begin
their evening songs at noon.
Long feathers of rain
on the breeze—a plumage
the exact color of the world.